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Google Planning To Remove CSS Regions From Blink
mikejuk writes "Google and Opera split from WebKit to create Blink, their own HTML rendering engine, and everyone was worried about the effect on standards. Now we have the first big example of a split in the form of CSS Regions support. Essentially Regions are used to provide the web equivalent of text flow, a concept very familiar to anyone who has used a desktop publishing program. The basic idea is that you define containers for a text stream which is then flowed from one container to another to provide a complex multicolumn layout. The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe — a long time DTP company. Now the Blink team has proposed removing Regions support to save 10,000 lines of code in 350,000 in the name of efficiency. If Google does remove the Regions code, which looks highly likely, this would leave Safari and IE 10/11 as the only two major browsers to support Regions. Both Apple and Microsoft have an interest in ensuring that their hardware can be used to create high quality magazine style layouts — Google and Opera aren't so concerned. I thought standards were there to implement not argue with."
Although mikejuk thinks this is a bad thing, a lot of people think CSS Regions are awful. Mozilla has never intended to implement them, instead offering the CSS Fragmentation proposal as an alternative. One major flaw of CSS Regions is its reliance upon markup that is used solely for layout, violating the separation of content and style that CSS is intended to enforce.
Regions are a horrible, messy, awkward layout model that fundamentally contradicts many of the benefits of HTML layout - particularly for different devices and screen sizes. If you think you need them, just make a PDF already - Adobe already has you covered.
It's called postscript.
If that's what you want to do just do it. Throw up a .pdf instead of a webpage.
Mangling HTML to make it like .pdf instead is the worst possibility. Yet historically that is what they keep doing. I wont hold my breath waiting for that to change. So expect to see 'regions' garbage stay.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Google is aiming more and more for the core, at the edge's expense.
They provide middling accessibility support, because it isn't something most people need. They dropped MathML support, because it isn't something that most people need. Now, they're dropping CSS Regions, because it isn't something that most people need.
It increasingly appears that you can have your Google product in any color, so long as it's red, green, blue, and yellow. One size fits most, and tough for you if it doesn't.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
need for a proper layout engine that's flexible and can achieve exactly what graphic designers want. ...
the closest thing the web had to offer magazine-quality layout
Magazine quality layout is exactly why I haven't subscribed to any magazine in years, and prefer to read it on the web, instead of turning to page 96, then page 102, ...
Graphic designers my ass! Clutter-Mongers is a better term.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Wrong.
My browser is supposed to control the layout, not the web site.
Do you have any idea how many websites render like absolute shit because I use a custom display font instead of letting them use tiny unreadable headache-inducing fonts?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Incorrect.
The art director controls your viewing experience, not you.
That is because you do not know what you like, and the art director knows more about you than you do. They are professionals at knowing what you like.
Really, it goes back to the old saying by Henry Ford "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
My recommendation to you is to stop going to websites without a professional art director. You are hurting your eyes if you do that, and any site that doesn't treat art direction seriously doesn't have useful content anyways, since layout itself is content.
Again, you do not know yourself more than what a professional would know about you. This is something that can't be stated clearly enough.
That's because Opera isn't Opera any more.
As the article hints at, they threw away their Presto rendering engine and lumped in with a Chrome-a-like base.
In doing so, they basically started the browser from scratch and in many of the versions released for it (including desktop versions) something like 75% of the features I use Opera for simply aren't there. They haven't got around to recreating them, or have publicly stated they have no intention of ever doing so. They have been several "stable" releases since then, and still no sign of a lot of basic functionality.
Ever since then, it's Chrome-with-knobs-on as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, the knobs are the developers, not the features.
Stick with 12.14 until it no longer renders your sites of choice, if you're an Opera fan at all.
The writeup was intended to disparage Google's decision as going off the rails and abandoning an otherwise widely supported standard feature. That image would have been significantly impaired if it made clear that firefox never supported it in the first place, meaning only Apple and Microsoft really bothered. That fact changes things from 'Google is breaking the web by ignoring widely adopted standards' to 'Google abandons obscure function that not many people can use already'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
One major flaw of CSS Regions is its reliance upon markup that is used solely for layout, violating the separation of content and style that CSS is intended to enforce.
I love the idea that content is marked up based on it's intrinsic content (this is a heading, this is a paragraph, this is a footer) and that is independent from the styling (make this text blue and center it). However if anyone thinks HTML+CSS is a good example of how to do this, they are delusional. View source on any web site and you'll find tens to hundreds of "divs", that is markup, used solely for layout purposes. Even worse, what should be pure markup is often abused for presentational purposes. h1/h2/h3/h4/h5/h6 are rarely used in "outline" form as they are intended, but rather h1's are styled one way, and h2's are styled another, and any particular section of content may start with one or the other based on visual style.
Regions are clearly no worse, or better, in this respect.
I do think "the web" needs something like Regions to go along with load-on-demand content baked into the service. Many web sites simulate that today with Javascript. Given that device sizes are actually getting more spread out, from watches to 80" TV displays, the layouts will have to be different. Being able to design a small/medium/large layout, including some flow of where the content should go, and then providing a list of content (here's 20 articles, load however many fit on the screen) would be awesome. Phones could load one at a time. A 30" monitor user would have all 20. It would all flow, without excessive markup.
In short, I see a lot of the pot calling the kettle black here, and people arguing rather than innovating.
The issue is that you can have layout-level control, or you can have device independence.
PDF gives you one, HTML used properly gives the second, choose one.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe ... I thought standards were there to implement not argue with.
CSS Regions is not a W3C standard. It is a Working Draft. The entire point of publishing a working draft is to solicit feedback from the community. There have been several working drafts that were never promoted to final recommendations, because there was no community consensus that they were a good idea. What Google and Mozilla are doing is a perfectly constructive part of the standardization process.
This gets into the sticky conflict of art versus utility. Most geeks consider the utility standpoint first: we want to absorb info as quickly as possible. However to some designers and/or readers, a web page is as much art as utility: the designer is trying to inject a feeling using look, style, and feel.
Are you going to tell an oil painter to "increase the contrast" so you can see his/her painting better? "Hey Monet, your dither size is too large, I can't make out the detail!"
I'm not condoning any one viewpoint, only pointing out there may be conflicting goals and expectations involved here.
Table-ized A.I.